Wishes And Opportunities

New opportunities often look different before and after you take them on.

Over the years, our staff members have had many different employment opportunities. Some we'd categorize as WYSIWYG - What You See Is What You Get - some have been better than they initially appeared, and some have been what at least one of our staffers calls a "farbut" opportunity.

For the record, a 'farbut' opportunity is one that looks good from afar, but it's far from good.

Today, there is at least one opportunity we're very happy not to have presented to any of us, the job of U.S. Secretary of State, which John Kerry will officially begin when he is sworn in on Friday.

Senator Kerry, currently of Massachusetts, will be touring his homestate today one final time, in a dual capacity - both as a farewell tour to his constituents and as a kind of warmup tour for what will be the many, many, many miles that he'll travel as U.S. Secretary of State.

While Kerry has long coveted the position, when we look at the challenges facing him, we can't help but wonder if Mr. Kerry is also wondering if this was a farbut opportunity for him.

To start with, America's strongest ally in the Middle East, Egypt, is still going through some unstable growing pains. One of America's other long-time Middle East allies, Israel, appears to have just chosen to pick a fight with it's neighbors in both Lebanon and Syria.

Speaking of Syria, that nation has been embroiled in civil war for two years, and it's also upsetting its neighbors with a seemingly ever-growing wave of escaping refugees, and a bleak outlook for peace anytime soon.

Dealing with nations like these in the Middle East is only one facet of the Secretary of State's job.

Secretary Kerry will also have to deal with less-than-stable future relations in Iran and Argentina, an unpredictable North Korea, a growing China, and a European Union still deeply wounded economically by rampant austerity.

Kerry will also have to deal, back in Washington, with his former colleagues in Congress, some of whom seem intent on letting the brutal and inefficient budget cuts of the Sequester take effect. If that damaging Republican-championed austerity does take effect, you can be sure Secretary Kerry's former colleagues will attack him for not fixing the problems at State that their deep budget cuts will cause.

Still, as many on Capitol Hill have known for years, John Kerry has been wishing for the opportunity to be Secretary of State - and now his wish has finally come true.

All we can say is, be careful what you wish for.

Having The Last Laugh

As President Obama noted in his immigration address on Tuesday, "It’s really important for us to remember our history." The crowd laughed with him, as they did at many points in his speech, though we doubt they were laughing for the same reasons we were.

The President also said more than once, that "The time is now," for immigration reform to pass. These are not new words for him, or a new idea for him to present to the nation. In fact, as Rachel Maddow pointed out last night, President Obama made a nearly identical speech on immigration in May 2011.

Know who else has proposed some of the same general ideas on comprehensive immigration reform already? President George W. Bush, back in 2007 - and again last month in a rare public speech in Dallas.

Yes, Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama - as well as the majority of Americans - are all on the same page regarding this issue, mostly for the same reasons: it's the right thing to do and it will help our economy.

Somehow, it's still no surprise though, that some in the Republican Party still think that comprehensive immigration reform is a silly idea.

We're well aware of those Republicans who are still under the delusion that Hispanic voters are a "natural constituency" for the GOP, and of the racists in the GOP like Rep. Lou Barletta (R-PA). It's not just some backbench legislators in the Republican Party who are racists, though.

As journalist Nick Baumann discovered recently, two prominent conservatives have been running a PAC - a Political Action Committee - that gave thousands of dollars to "white nationalists." One of the two conservative leaders also has long-standing ties to another racist organization.

It also doesn't change the fact that the one major issue most of those currently in power in Republican and conservative circles fought President George W. Bush on, was comprehensive immigration reform. This is a topic that many in the media just seem to be waking up to now, though our staff members have been openly discussing this fact on Twitter with conservative writers for some time.

That President Bush still supports comprehensive immigration reform, for non-selfish reasons, and President Obama quite obviously supports similar reforms, bodes well for the chances to fix this long-standing and troublesome issue.

The details obviously will be hashed out in the House and Senate over the next few months, though we believe that the proposal President Obama presented yesterday, and the proposal a bipartisan group of Senators presented Monday, are already close enough that compromise should not be as difficult as many feared.

All of these are reasons for hope on the issue of comprehensive immigration reform, and are part of the reason our staff was laughing along with President Obama's speech on Tuesday.

The other major reason we were laughing, though - other than Paul's cartoon - is the simple irony of the situation.

The one name the modern Republican Party runs from like it was the plague is "George W. Bush." Yet, on that one issue - comprehensive immigration reform - President George W. Bush is the one name the Republican Party should have listened to on immigration years ago - and didn't.

Apparently, the current group of Republican "leaders" forgot their recent history.

Now, we all know who's going to have the last laugh on immigration reform after all.

...Like Another Hole In Your Head

There's a reason we were not at all surprised about the immigration reform efforts blooming this week in Washington, DC, though our lack of surprise is not directly related to immigration.

As we noted in the links of Monday's expanded edition, last weekend, in the biting cold, there was yet another rally in Washington, DC. This time, the rally was in favor of common sense gun safety laws, like those President Obama and several members of Congress are trying to get passed this year.

While this may shock our more liberal readers, not all Republicans are against common sense gun regulations. In repeated surveys, majorities of Republicans are in favor of those regulations like universal background checks and restrictions on high-capacity magazines, just like their Democratic and Independent counterparts.

One reason so many sane Republicans agree with these kinds of proposed rules is fairly obvious: On six of seven days last week, an American was shot by a gun at a gun show. The numbers don't lie - the more guns Americans have access to, the more injuries and accidental deaths are going to occur from those guns, often due to poor gun regulation laws.

In short, Americans need more crappy laws about guns like we need another hole in our collective head. That's why the common sense ideas that have already been offered on gun regulation - like universal background checks - are significantly more likely to pass this time, because even an idiot can see they're good ideas.

In a nutshell, that's also the reason our staff has very little concern - and maybe even a bit of hope - about many of the ideas offered in the various immigration reform plans being suddenly floated this week.

In case you missed it, a bipartisan group of Senators made a big show on Monday about presenting their blueprint for comprehensive immigration reform in the Senate. President Obama, some time ago, had scheduled his own presentation of a comprehensive immigration reform plan for this week, though the White House has already given clues that it may support the Senate's plan. There are even rumors of a bipartisan immigration plan in the House.

If it seems like a sudden and unexpected turn of events for the notoriously obstructionist Congressional Republicans, you shouldn't really be surprised. As Ezra Klein points out, even Republicans can see the truth about immigration and voting. In the 2012 Presidential election, President Obama received 71% of the Hispanic vote. In 2016, the projected share of the non-white vote is expected to rise two percent.

Unfortunately for Republicans, some conservatives continue to believe that Hispanics are natural conservatives - which, as conservative writers like David Frum have pointed out more than once, they are not.

Liberals and Progressives should not be immediately jumping for joy, however. As most of the immigration proposals currently stand, there is still far too much focus on border issues and immigrants, and far too little focus on employer-related issues like E-Verify and real enforcement - for example, a penalty system for employers that would heavily dissuade them from luring low-wage undocumented workers across the border. Without those solutions in place, Americans will simply be having this same discussion about immigration in another twenty years, just as we did twenty-five years ago.

Overall, the key features we're seeing among the multiple immigration reform plans and rumors - acknowledgement of a need for a fair path to citizenship, registration of applicants, fines and back taxes, and rewards for highly-skilled immigrants  - are mostly common sense measures that most sane partisans on both sides of the political aisle agree with.

Hopefully, our Congresspersons will - for once - have the good sense to approve the common sense reforms on both gun safety and immigration as soon as possible, without consulting hordes of well-paid highly partisan lobbyists, who would prefer a half-assed set of reform bills that solve little, and earn the lobbyists continued fat retainers.

This country needs another half-assed set of reform bills like... well, like a visit to another sloppy gun show.